Artist
Patavee Viranuvat ( Thailand )
A talk show and screening by Patavee Viranuvat, currently artist in residence at Sapporo's "s-air".
Synposis: A lot of people have asked me 'Why mother?', and I think, 'Why not?'. Simple as it is, we usually ignore such a distance. One day during a visit to one of my friends in Zenibako, one part of Hokkaido, the landscape looked familiar, like I had seen and visited it before, but never. I was searching for a location to shoot my film, and seeking out characters who could remind me of someone that I'm looking for. However, I bumped into a new friend there. He's from Tokyo, and has moved to Sapporo for a while. I asked him, simply, about his mother. 'We live only 1 train station away from each other, so it's not that far,' he said. He also told me that he doesn't visit his mother that often. A few weeks later, I made a trip to the other side of Hokkaido, and met a Thai lady who had decided to leave her children in Thailand, to come and work in Japan for years, in order to gather enough money to raise her children. I asked her about her children. She cried unstoppably. The distance each one has created, gave me a little hint to the problem which most of us hardly overcome.
The 'Navel' is the part of our bodies that has long been ignored. Somehow, with no gender, it is the part that initially connected us all to our mothers when we were launched into the world. Staring, considering, and trying to understand that 'part' is a reminder of the potential mistake that we might not want to make before death arrives. During the long journey in Hokkaido, I found many Tunnels in the middle of nowhere. It's strange because they were built on empty land, with nothing above. The sky in Hokkaido is a lot wider and bigger than in Thailand. When I look above my head, all I can see is the endless sky. But every time I pass a tunnel, there happens to be a 'dark spot' in the bright wide sky. Inside the tunnel, I hear a strange sound, caused by wind hitting moving objects. The moment inside the tunnel is very short, but somehow, consciousness arises in between. In order to reach the other side, unknown to us, we all have to go through darkness, without choice. But not for long, the light comes. After the long night is gone, the sun comes.
Patavee Viranuvat was born in 1982 and lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand. He is an artist who posses a mastery of photography and a wide range of film/video expressions. His work was selected for the Busan International Film Festival in 2008 and his future work is highly anticipated.
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